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almost like a dream of level unhindered harmony when we d be dancing and running over green meadows with higher and lower level mobs alike killing each other in the process naturally i mean us and the mobs not players killing each other lotro is a fairly strictly pve focused game mobs as far as 9 levels below you if memory serves would get on your case as lotro used a sharp aggro cut off rather than a gradual never ending reduction in perception radius if it was 10 levels below you it would ignore your existence completely but spot you perfectly fine if the difference was less which was more than a little silly from a simulation point of view but naturally and it s a shame it s so natural really no later than when you were 5 levels higher than the mob the poor bugger may as well have had his weapons or claws replaced with cotton swabs as they d never be a danger to you on the other end you could pick a fight with a mob 5 levels above you and it would be a winnable affair the sharp cut off i e the point at which you d just be precluded from being able to hit coming somewhere not far above that it was indeed easy to see that your level was not so much a representation of your character power as naive pre mmo me had thought but the very basis and structure of said power everything else effecting only a small variance interlude this is not to downplay the insane power creep and power discrepancy games like wow or rift create between characters of the same max level due to escalating gear rewards not only because any character below max level does not have access to that gear but also because the means of earning that gear are usually balanced in such a way that there is no way for a sub level cap character to appropriately contribute to the success of the process of their acquisition even if they are not which is also often the case mechanically excluded from participation at all in other words at best a raider can toss a boe drop to a leveller alt which they won t be able to equip until they hit level cap there s no way for the leveller alt to actively earn that reward themselves fast forward to rift let s keep this short with one concise example if i take on a mob 3 levels above me something close to half of my attacks do not land in the target despite me having a 5 hit bonus from talents and another 1 5 from gear stats this breaks simulation breaks immersion and basically constitutes the game coming at me with a big flashing neon sign saying do not go this way go that way on the other end of course it also gets dull to fight mobs you outlevel pretty quickly all in all you end up with this really narrow corridor of what you re supposed to do why does this bother me particularly because i play together with mfcfkamfdfkamflm my favourite cleric formerly known as my favourite druid formerly known as my favourite lore mistress and i m really very much enjoying it currently we re levelling together levelling together means because of the above staying at the same level ideally within a few percent points of a level from each other as soon as you drift apart even a little you start banging the walls of that narrow corridor and the game comes at you with its flashing neon signs consequently when one of us doesn t play the other effectively can t do anything this is exacerbated by the quest driven game play which offers you exactly one way to interact with the content by doing the quests which is content we want to do together in fact rift offers a resort of sorts here in the form of the namesake rifts one could run around a lower level zone just outside the xp range and close rifts doing something like that alone does start feeling like an end in itself pretty quickly though so what s the result a subconscious rush to level cap which is ironic because rift is a game that is actually really good fun to play below level cap as well i have been and am still enjoying the levelling process despite having never been a fan of quests but this is one of the fundamental reasons why people rush to level cap not because we re all impatient and can t enjoy the road for the goal not all of us are at least no it s because only at level cap that number which is way more powerful than it should ever have been stops changing and only then can we meaningfully play with others especially with specific others rather than random others on a level field to close and be clear i m not complaining about playing together playing together is awesome i m complaining about the restraints resulting from a level centric quest driven game design one of those restraints is that playing together only works either in a perfectly static group which excludes the sharing independently made discoveries and experiences element or at level cap which needlessly devalues the game before level cap yeah i told you it was going to be one of those posts share this email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on reddit opens in new window reddit share on x opens in new window x share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin print opens in new window print like loading this entry was posted in game mechanics and tagged concepts rift on june 18 2011 by rem more on riddles 13 replies in my previous post i made a few remarks on how riddles shouldn t be viewed as inherently slowing and interrupting how they should be part of the game world and the game experience as a whole the comments made me realise that i should have emphasised that point much more the problem is that when we say riddle what we imagine is having to stop and align a bunch of stones such that they light up or something like that and all the time while figuring out how to align them our gaming levelling flow is kind of interrupted and we feel slowed down then there is an easy way to accelerate and bridge that interrupt namely by looking up the solution which we promptly do here s the thing when i say riddle i don t mean the align five rocks sort of things at least not exclusively what i mean is this usually that is in an mmorpg you re likely to play in 2011 you get a quest that tells you to do something and how to do that something is laid out step by step kill x loot y apply to z a riddle in the wider sense of the term for me is when you have a goal but no recipe how to achieve it you need to figure out how to get there yourself this comes with a few issues attached for one if all goals in your game come with a recipe except for some which you consider your riddles the reality is that the recipe driven gameplay takes place at a particular speed which is by nature higher than a riddle based one can be thus when your players get to your riddle they feel slowed down their flow interrupted for example in the early levelling game in rift in freemarch there are a couple of story related quests that ask you to find something someone but don t tell you where that doesn t add any sense of mystery but only annoyance because all other quests tell or rather show you pretty exactly where to go so suddenly having to run around more or less blindly suspecting that there is probably exactly one right spot to look in but unless you end up standing on top of it you won t know because there are no hits to work with feels rather awkward which leads in nicely to the second point in the real world figuring things out is fun if you re the inquisitive type that is and actually even just possible because everything takes place in a highly consistent system the laws of nature any knowledge you have about how a certain process works is universally applicable everywhere and always and you accumulate a lot of that knowledge all those brilliant heads we watch in our favourite tv shows solving crimes and difficult problems are basically characters who are really good at connecting causes and effects a game world doesn t have this luxury the laws of a game world are inevitably and in significant parts also desirably different from those of the real world and potentially arbitrary at that therefore unless you make an active effort to relay the laws of your game world to the players and then stay rigorously consistent the players won t have a frame of reference to work with this is the important difference between being able to figure something out gradually and trying things at random until something works to use an example from rift again there is this awkward puzzle in moonshade highlands the point of which is basically to open valves along a water pipe to fill target reservoirs with water the reservoirs are aligned in a chain filling up one after the other you fill up all 10 you win each valve after being opened stays open for about 10 12 seconds and cannot be interacted with until it closes again so you can t just keep them open continuously they will inevitably close and you ll have to reopen so far so pretty evident from the arrangement you find it should also be noted that there is no actual puzzle element at work here unlike in the other puzzles we did so far there s no actual secret to solve here it s basically a click time game which is bad in itself but that s not the point here the point is that how the riddle or shall i say the water behaves is not consistent with anything you could derive from real world or game world observation the water flows when all valves are open through the pressure generated by the source so far so good we ll also accept that the valves auto close after a while because that s how they work fair enough such are the tools we re given but why is it that water already in the target canisters starts draining when there s no fresh water being pumped in is there a leak somewhere possible but i can t observe it all i can see is lights going on and off and when one of them remains on while the previous ones turn off i have no idea whether it s just a bug in the game or actual information being relayed to me i can t tell because neither is consistent with any reference system i d feel my actions and their consequences bound to also while it s understandable that the flow stops when any of the valves closes because that cuts off the pressure of the source it is entirely unclear why this causes all water that is already in the pipe but not in the target canisters yet to outright disappear that doesn t align with any law of physics or game world one would be aware of shouldn t it remain in the pipe and be pumped forward once i reopen the previous valves again it just disappears this behaviour cannot be derived from any other process observed in the game nor is it teaching me anything about how water behaves in rift it is nothing more than an arbitrary mechanic of this particular riddle no consistency whatsoever this example got a bit lengthy but was important to explain what i mean when i call for consistent rule systems if we want players to figure something out we need to give them knowledge based on which they can make educated deductions we can t give that knowledge out all at once at the moment when it s required that s the recipe approach utilised by modern day quests we need to introduce it gradually letting the players interactively observe consistent and reoccurring processes and events allowing them to learn about the game world and how it works and then when someone goes ahead and creates an online resource about the consistent laws governing our game no harm is done at all this is what community research should be all about rather than providing players with scripts to success besides we need the game to take place at a slower pace such that stopping to think doesn t feel like an interruption of course solutions will still be discovered and gathered online but here s the thing once again cf previous post players don t look up everything they look up things they aren t having fun doing on their own when the players feel slowed down they will look up the solution to accelerate back to their usual pace when they re used to a slower pace in general the difference won t be there to compensate for the modern raiding game is a good example of a bad riddle in fact why does everyone look up strategies and then follow them with a ridiculous rigour not understanding why something may or may not be applicable because the pace set by the rest of the game doesn t align with the notion of stopping to think attempting to observe and find a solution at the same time the raid encounters themselves don t make much of an effort to provide observable cues to allow you to grasp what s going on without already knowing in advance as telwyn commented on the previous post the developers pretty much expect us to know we re very rarely provided with analogies to established knowledge because there s very little consistent knowledge that could be referenced to begin with except you know don t stand in the stuff on the floor unless it s good stuff naturally share this email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on reddit opens in new window reddit share on x opens in new window x share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin print opens in new window print like loading this entry was posted in game mechanics and tagged concepts rift on june 4 2011 by rem wikipedia 6 replies i was recently watching the recording of a political cabaret live performance for my german readers it was of course volker pispers with the 2010 version of his bis neulich programme he was ridiculing the economical nonsense of a news announcement predicting the pension premium rates for 2050 wondering how one can pretend to derive any serious information from such detailed predictions that far in the future including his wonderful line economic experts are people who calculate how the future will look like if everything remains exactly as it is now he invited us to think back in time and to consider which events of the last 20 years would have appeared like a reasonable prediction in 1990 in an off hand joke he posed as a hypothetical student asking what no wikipedia how did you do your homework then and then it hit me just because wikipedia exists schools didn t stop giving out homework even the most slow to adapt school systems can t help but realise that at this point virtually everyone has access to the internet meaning that all answers can be looked up interpretations can be found essays can be assembled from sufficiently reworded sources and google generally knows everything i pulled a somewhat audacious stunt myself about 10 years ago when i failed to read an assigned book in time and instead looked up a one page summary and interpretation of what it is supposed to mean on the then young internet and proceeded to score an a for an oral discussion of a...